Quotes & Sayings About Life Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness

Bloodshed, gentlemen, no doubt is lamentable. I have seen some of it
more perhaps than many of those who talk about it with such levity. But there are worse things than bloodshed, even on an extreme scale ... The trampling down of law and order which, under the conditions of a civilised state, assure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
all this would be worse than bloodshed. — Winston S. Churchill

We have forgotten what Thomas Jefferson told us in 1776: that we are endowed by the Creator "with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Not happiness, mind you, but its pursuit. By implication Jefferson warned that if you pursue happiness for someone else, you deny him the right to pursue it on his own. — John Rosemond

The function of our Government is to insure to all its citizens, now and hereafter, their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we of this generation destroy the resources from which our children would otherwise derive their livelihood, we reduce the capacity of our land to support a population, and so either degrade the standard of living or deprive the coming generations of their fight to life on this continent. — Theodore Roosevelt

[Book's subtitle:] Designed as a beacon of light to guide women to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but which may be read by members of the sterner sect, without injury to themselves or the book. — Marietta Holley

For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors. — Andrew Bacevich

The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right ... Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs. — Hannah Arendt

Mexico is a country without political freedom, without freedom of speech, without a free press, without a free ballot, without a jury system, without political parties, without any of our cherJ ished guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is a land where there has been no contest for the office of president for more than a generation, where the executive rules all things by means of a standing army, where political offices are sold for a fixed price. I found Mexico to be a land where the people are poor because they have no rights, where peonage is the rule for the great mass, and where actual chattel slavery obtains for hundreds of thousands. — John Kenneth Turner

Our democracy is dependent on people who passionately cherish the ideals of a democracy. Every man is created equal with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's a wonderful idea, and it takes people who cherish that idea to be actively involved in the process. — George Takei

It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator. — Tom Stoppard

Our unalienable right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, those rights were stripped from college kids in Blackburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers at Columbine. And, and from first graders in Newtown, first graders. — Barack Obama

The Constitution guarantees us our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. It doesn't guarantee our rights to charity. — Jesse Ventura

The evidence of [the] natural right [of expatriation], like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness, is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man. We do not claim these under the charters of kings or legislators, but under the King of Kings. — Thomas Jefferson

That is our generation's task, to make these works, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American. — Barack Obama

This country was founded upon the principle that we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - those rights are what make America great, and they belong to each and every one of us. — Charles B. Rangel

America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others. — Alex Epstein

More than a decade ago, a Supreme Court decision literally wiped off the books of fifty states statutes protecting the rights of unborn children. Abortion on demand now takes the lives of up to 1.5 million unborn children a year. Human life legislation ending this tragedy will some day pass the Congress, and you and I must never rest until it does. Unless and until it can be proven that the unborn child is not a living entity, then its right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be protected. — Ronald Reagan

The government is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend everyone's equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when the government does not fulfill that obligation, it is the right of the people, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, to 'alter or abolish' the government. — Howard Zinn

To us all, life is a gift, liberty is a right, and the pursuit of happiness is the object supreme. But our conduct in the pursuit differs in accordance with the measure of justice we uphold. A common measure is only possible when we begin to understand and learn to appreciate each other's point of view and point of direction. — Ameen Rihani

Anyone who believes in the natural and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is obliged to accept that individuals have the right to buy and sell alcohol. That's why all the regulations that people take for granted-the restrictions on hours of operation, the ban on Sunday sales, the minimum distance from schools and churches, the minimum age, and the protection of local wineries from competition by wineries in other states-are illegitimate. — Sheldon Richman

Today everybody is talking about the fact that we live in one world; because of globalization, we are all part of the same planet. They talk that way, but do they mean it? We should remind them that the words of the Declaration [of Independence] apply not only to people in this country, but also to people all over the world. People everywhere have the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When the government becomes destructive of that, then it is patriotic to dissent and to criticize - to do what we always praise and call heroic when we look upon the dissenters and critics in totalitarian countries who dare to speak out. — Howard Zinn

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ... but only when you pay your taxes? That means your freedom is rented, leased, & not unalienable. — Steve Maraboli

In a composite Nation like ours, made up of almost every variety of the human family, there should be, as before the Law, no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no black, no white, but one country, one citizenship equal rights and a common destiny for all.
A government that cannot or does not protect the humblest citizen in his right to life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness, should be reformed or overthrown, without delay. — Frederick Douglass

In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Love of country cannot be a supersized version of individual narcissism. True love of country-of this country-is love of our children, of a creed that promises them a better life before it promises us anything, and embraces the sacrifices needed to make that better life. True love of country is giving ourselves to a cause and a purpose larger than ourselves. And that cause is to make liberty worth having, to make the pursuit of happiness deeper than the quest for personal pleasure, and to leave a legacy of progress and possibility. — Eric Liu

The People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. — Frank Norris

So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the Captial of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed! — Solomon Northup

Results for "What are the maintenance requirements of the human being? Life, Liberty, the pursuit of happiness and food, clothing, shelter and medical care. Keeping us confused and divided against one another about these rights, the multinational power elite teaches us in America that only life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights. In socialist nations they promote the view that only food, clothing, shelter and medical care are rights. — Kerry Thornley

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens. — Dan Savage

You want to reclaim your country? You got to go back to the first men who started this country, the founding fathers and this is going to be shocking for the liberal professors out there that are indoctrinating our kids but the founding fathers believed in the Judeo-Christian god that believed we have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness! You can pursuit it. If you don't get it, it's your fault! You messed up. Go back to work. Work harder. — Brad Stine

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants. — Jimmy Carter

There's not much a newspaper reporter can do about dead men. But a newspaper reporter and a cop and a judge can deliver some justice. That's why the founding fathers wrote it up the way they did, I suppose. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Everyone is entitled to those things. — Charlie LeDuff

People truly reaching across boundaries - be they religious or race, political or geographic. A state that is sincerely civil and respectful of each individual's pathway toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be our goal. — Jon Huntsman Jr.

If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. — Terence McKenna

A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on you mind. (It's another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini. It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! — Steven Pinker

The recently ended twentieth century was characterized by a level of human rights violations unparalleled in all of human history. In his book Death by Government, Rudolph Rummel estimates some 170 million government-caused deaths in the twentieth century. The historical evidence appears to indicate that, rather than protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of their citizens, governments must be considered the greatest threat to human security. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Democracy rests upon two pillars: one, the principle that all men are equally entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and the other, the conviction that such equal opportunity will most advance civilization. — Louis D. Brandeis

They all want to be happy. They all think they should be happy. And they're quick to trot out their most cherished document and point to where they were promised "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But you'll find that though they all parrot that little phrase, they think none too hard about that word "pursuit". To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don't do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a feeling of entitlement for happiness, then make the leap that happiness should, therefore, be easily won, automatic. There's too much wrong in there to even scratch at that! — Geoffrey Wood

History has shown time and time again that
there is no such thing as all things being equal. That is why Jefferson
wrote that our inalienable rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. Nothing is guaranteed in life, especially happiness. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself. — Allan Bloom

Wise statesmen ... established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began ... — Abraham Lincoln

Where America was founded on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Sharia was founded on death, slavery, and the pursuit of power. — Nick Adams

A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization. — Matthew Woodring Stover

America stands for liberty, for the pursuit of happiness and for the unalienable right for life. This right to life cannot be granted or denied by government because it does not come from government, it comes from the creator of life. — George W. Bush

Because of our freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. People assume the most important word in that sentence is 'freedom,' when, in fact, it is 'pursue.' If we don't pursue life, we are just as free to waste it. Our averageness is the degree to which we fail to attempt that pursuit. — Ryan Quinn

We are today engaged in a war. It is an economic war over our
sovereignty as human beings with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. The "pursuit of happiness" means the right
to create wealth through our labor and to enjoy the fruits thereof.
The battle now is over who has the moral, the ethical, and the legal
right to the fruits of our labor. Are we to be free, or are we to be
slaves? Just whose money is it anyway? — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government ... — Thomas Jefferson

We were endowed by our Creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We were not endowed by the Federal Government. We were not endowed by entitlements. We were not endowed by pork barrel spending; we were not endowed by budgetary earmarks. — Lawrence Kudlow

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate ... is a totalitarian's dream. — Steven Pinker

From the beginning, Judeo-Christian principles have been the foundation for American public dialogue and government policy. They serve as the solid basis for political activism in support of a better socioeconomic environment. Found in American homes, truth from the Hebrew Christian Bible has enabled individual liberty to prevail over secular empires because it is a practical message about reality from man's Creator.
In their quest for liberty, Americans focused upon the conspicuously self-evident "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." It is the governing character of these principles (laws), such as humility, the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, that leads to success. This is the sure foundation upon which man's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" rests. Called "virtue" by America's Founding Fathers, the impartial and divine element frees man to do what is right. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Cor. 3:17). — David A. Norris

The Supreme Court has said that: Marriage is the most important relation in life. Now that's being withheld from the plaintiffs. It is the foundation of society. It is essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness. It's a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights and older than our political parties. One of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause. A right of intimacy to the degree of being sacred. And a liberty right equally available to a person in a homosexual relationship as to heterosexual persons. — Ted Olson

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ... America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.' — Martin Luther King Jr.

Software-industry battles are fought by highly paid and out-of-shape nerds furiously pounding computer keyboards while they guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren't very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it's about stock options. — Nathan Myhrvold

Equally important, anyone stupid enough to contemplate invading America would soon reflect on the fact that it contains hundreds of millions of guns, which are available to a population that takes its life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness very seriously. — Tim Marshall

When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom by the way were clergymen, they said that we had certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them. I still believe that. — Mike Huckabee

Parker, who was six feet four with nothing to protect his bones from exposure to the weather but tough-looking leathery skin, was so skeptical that at one point I thought he was going to pass, but he finally conceded that the move might be undertaken without undue risk to juridical virtue, to his own reputation, or to his client's life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. When all details had been settled and money passed - a dollar bill from Sarah to Parker as a token retainer - I got at the phone and dialed a number. — Rex Stout

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights; that among these are life, and the right to
make that of another miserable by thrusting upon him an
incalculable quantity of acquaintances; liberty, particularly the
liberty to introduce persons to one another without first
ascertaining if they are not already acquainted as enemies; and
the pursuit of another's happiness with a running pack of
strangers. — Ambrose Bierce

Wrong is because it is the taking of a life. When you take someone's life, you also take away their right to liberty and their pursuit of happiness. If you take someone's life, you also take their dream, their future, their family, their career, and their children away from them. All other rights are lost when you take away the right to life. — Tony Evans

The "pursuit of happiness" is such a key element of the "American (ideological) dream" that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: "We holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Where did the somewhat awkward "pursuit of happiness" come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property - the latter was replaced by "the pursuit of happiness" during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves' right to property. — Slavoj Zizek

Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would've worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would've then better lead them on to happiness. — Geoffrey Wood

When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness. — David McCullough

The Declaration calls us to recognize the inherent equality of all people. And when it becomes unmistakably evident that a government is denying the governed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it's the right of people to establish a new government to secure these unalienable rights. — Mike Crapo

It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that? — Chris Gardner

Some Continental army officers joined the search, looking for African Americans they had once owned. General Washington was one who spent some time combing the countryside. He found two of his slaves who had escaped in the raid of the HMS Savage. He sent them back to Mount Vernon and a lifetime of servitude.35 In this hour of triumph for a revolution waged for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Washington also found the time to congratulate his army on the victory that had brought "Joy" to "every Breast. — John Ferling

People, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side — Elizabeth Strout